On-Line Collision Avoidance of Two Command-Based Industrial Robotic Arms Using Advanced Collision Map

Abstract

This research aims to build a system for detecting and avoiding collisions between two industrial robotic arms that are controlled using point-to-point commands in on-line mode. Both robots have no prior knowledge of the commands which will be sent after starting the system. For this purpose, a collision map method has been improved to detect potential collisions between the robots and represent them as a collision area on the map. Commonly, industrial robotic arms have a cylindrical or a near-rectangular shape. The links of the robots have been approximated geometrically by using the swept sphere volume which presents tight modelling. Moreover, it is extremely easy to check for collisions and, therefore, feasible for on-line applications. To produce a collision-free trajectory for the robot, scheduling of the command execution time is necessary to avoid any collision areas on the map. The system has been tested on an OpenGL-based simulator to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system.